Stepping outside his family home in Warm Springs, John Phillips could see Virginia here and West Virginia there, the Appalachians over here and the Alleghenies there.

“Our backyard,” he said, “is essentially a mountain.”

Phillips has got more than just a little mountain man to him, starting with the fact that he’s built a bit like one at 6-foot-5 and 251 pounds. Lest anyone misinterpret the term “mountain man” to mean anything derogatory or suggest a stereotype, understand that Phillips also earned his sociology degree in only 3 ½ years at one of the country’s most prestigious academic institutions, the University of Virginia.

Likewise, there is no insult in being referred to as the “other tight end” with the Dallas Cowboys, which pretty much was Phillips’ lot until now. After three years of blocking in the same offense as Jason Witten – a tight end who’s caught enough passes to be named a six-time All-Pro – Phillips signed as a free agent with the team that has Antonio Gates.

“I was just looking for something new, looking to establish myself,” said Phillips, who lost the 2010 season to a knee injury. “Hopefully, I can get out here and be more versatile in this offense. Maybe I can carve out a role for myself where I can catch more balls.

“We’re moving the ball around. You saw what Peyton Manning did with this offense, throwing to a lot of people.”

With his size and technique, Phillips long has been considered more of a blocker than a receiver, and the Chargers clearly signed him with the imperative to provide quarterback Philip Rivers with more protection. He'll play a central role in replacing tight end Randy McMichael, a strong blocker whom the team released in March.

Catching a pass for a touchdown, Phillips said, is “almost as fulfilling" as delivering a wicked block to spring a ball-carrier.

Of course, it’s for their productivity as receivers that Gates and Witten have gotten so much attention. As imposing as he’s been so far with his sheer physicality, Phillips has opened some eyes at Chargers Park to his potential as an athletic target. Going high while twisting backwards the other day, he reached up for a one-handed grab of a ball thrown where nobody else in the vicinity could possibly have gotten it.

In 48 games with the Cowboys, Phillips caught 30 passes, two of them for touchdowns. His rookie season of 2009, he opened the scoring in a playoff win over Philadelphia with a 1-yard TD reception. Appropriately, it came on a play called “Slam.”

“You slam the (defensive) end, then you turn him off the ball, roll into the endzone and they throw it to you,” Phillips said. “It’s a one-person route and it’s coming to me. I remember we practiced that play every Saturday of the year and never ran it. They ran it for the first time in the playoffs. I was jacked up.”

Phillips already has fit in well enough with the Chargers to be catching flak for his ride in the players parking lot. It’s a 1999 Tahoe that he bought in college, by which time it already had 90,000 miles on it, and it’s up to 160,000 with the move to California.

“Gates made fun of it,” Phillips said. “It’s got nothing on it at all. Straight factory. But a nice, expensive car really wouldn’t appeal to me. See, the way I grew up, anything fancier just doesn’t appeal to me.”

He grew up in Warm Springs, just on the Virginia side of the border, a smaller-than-small town with a population under 150. Phillips said the entire county (Bath), inhabited by fewer than 5,000 people, has zero stoplights and one high school where Phillips was a three-sport star who was All-State in baseball.

“I loved it,” Phillips said of the rural life. “It’s a yes-sir, no-ma’am type of place. Where I’m from, there’s not a whole lot of money, and I went to a school with a lot of people who really relied on growing a garden. I could hunt right off my back porch, and back there, you hunted deer and caught fish to live.

“One of my favorite sayings is, if you didn’t catch, kill or grow it, you’re gonna struggle in the winter. We can everything; we freeze everything. We use wood heat and the wood’s got to be cut. It’s quite a bit different from what people in California probably are used to. But it's kept me pretty grounded.”